1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to printing methods and printing apparatuses for printing on a medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
To print using a printer that is connected to a computer, a printer driver on the computer creates print data specific for the model of the printer, the print data are transmitted from the computer to the printer, and the printer carries out printing based on the print data that are received. The printer driver creates print data in accordance with the content to be printed so that printing is carried out under optimal conditions. For example, if text is to be printed, then the printer driver creates print data in such a manner that the printer carries out printing under optimal conditions for printing text.
With printing using such printer drivers, however, it is necessary to install a printer driver that is compatible with the printer model onto the computer. That is, if a computer is to carry out printing using different printer models, it is necessary for a user to install printer drivers for the various printer models onto the computer.
Accordingly, to obviate the need to install printer drivers for each printer model, attempts have been made to standardize the format of data that are transmitted from the computer side to the printer side, for example. When transmitted data are standardized, however, it is not possible to include detailed information relating to the print conditions. For that reason, the printers carry out printing in accordance with conditions set in advance on the printer side.
However, the optimal print conditions are different for the printing of text and the printing of images such as natural pictures, for example. For that reason, data that are received by the printer cannot be printed at high quality just by printing them according to pre-set conditions.
On the other hand, when the printer analyzes the nature of the data that are received in order to perform printing that is suited to the content of the data, a large computational burden is placed on the printer, and this increases the time of the printing process.
Various types of mobile devices have been developed to date, including PDA (Personal Digital Assistance) and portable telephones. Also, these mobile devices are capable of transmitting obtained image data and character data that have been taken in to a printer wirelessly by an internal antenna. The printer receives the image data or the character data and prints out these data.
Bluetooth is one method of such wireless communication. It allows printing to be achieved without requiring a direct connection to the printer via cable (for example, Tekunoroji kaitai shinsho, Bluetooth gijutsu kaisetsu gaido (Technology New Reader: A Guide to Bluetooth Technology), authored by MIYAZU Kazuhiro and edited by Nippon Ericsson K. K., published May 25, 2001 by K. K. Ric Telecom).
Conversely, mobile devices have also conventionally been connected to a printer through cable so as to allow printing.
However, although image data or character data sent from a mobile device can be printed by a printer, it is necessary to set the print conditions at the printer side, and thus the task of setting must be carried out for each mobile device (for each data type), and there has been the problem that it is troublesome to perform this task of setting. Another factor contributing to this is that the functionality of some mobile devices is insufficient, with sufficient quality to allow the print conditions to be set not yet being achieved.
Furthermore, advances in communications technology have made it possible for a plurality of mobile devices to be connected to a single printer simultaneously. Thus, when the print settings are changed on the printer side each time, printing cannot be executed smoothly, and this led to the problem that the task of printing could not be carried out efficiently.
Moreover, as the number of devices that are connected to the printer, including those connected by cable, increases, it becomes necessary to change the print settings so that optimal printing can be attained for those devices.
When there are numerous types of devices, however, there are instances where printing is performed using previous settings, such as when the user forgets to change the print settings, and this results in printing that was not what a user had anticipated. A conceivable way to prevent this is to input settings information each time on the setting screen of the printer, but if printing is to be carried out wirelessly, then to do so precludes the meaning of adopting a wireless format.